“The CLS is one of the most competitive national scholarships for American undergraduate and graduate students who are working toward advanced competence in the nation’s critical languages. The acceptance rate for the 2012 competition was 12%,” said Dean Robert Bley-Vroman of the UH Mānoa College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature. “I’m very pleased that three of our students have been awarded this competitive scholarship.”

The students are among 631 undergraduate and graduate applicants nationwide who received scholarships from the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program to study Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla/Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish or Urdu languages.

Selected students will spend seven to ten weeks in intensive language institutes in 14 countries where these languages are spoken.